LGBTD&D: His Beloved

Did James Wyatt and Matt Sernet quietly make D&D history?

There’s a new Wandering Monsters today from James Wyatt, about origin stories for D&D monsters. It’s quite good, and worth a read even if you don’t care about D&D Next, if only because you might find something in there worth plundering for your own campaign. There’s a lot in there to talk about, but what I’m going to focus on is pretty much irrelevant to the actual topic of the article.

I’m going to start with some short, disjointed quotes from the second story, which Wyatt credits to Matt Sernet. They’re not supposed to make sense, I’m doing this to point something out:

“This one tells of a young man whose beloved, a sailor, was lost at sea…the young man went to the shore and called upon the gods of the sea and all other powers to return his beloved to him. In answer, or so it seemed, a withered crone emerged from the water…she spoke to him, offering to return his beloved if he agreed to perform a task for her…

The young man demanded the return of his beloved first, and the hag agreed…

The young man ran to the boat to greet his beloved, and a pair of rotting arms rose up to embrace him. His beloved was dead, drowned and nibbled by the fishes, risen by the sea hag’s magic into a horrible zombie. The young man fled.

…

But the young man’s mind was all but gone. His memories of his life before this hideous transformation were vague at best, and he had no memory whatsoever of the beloved who had driven him to his fateful bargain.”

Quick, what is the gender of the ill-fated young man’s beloved? How do you know? Read the whole article if you think I’ve pulled some trickery with the ellipses—the story goes out of its way to avoid giving the beloved a gender.

I assumed the character was male. Partly because the story conspicuously avoids a gender, partly because that’s what I immediately thought  when the story referred to a sailor. Which is evidence of bias on my part, obviously—although in my defense, D&D’s “default” is a sort of medieval-Renaissance high fantasy pastiche, and in the real middle ages a sailor was probably going to be a man. But this isn’t the real middle ages, and it’s a generally accepted convention that the D&D world has at least something approaching gender equality. If nothing else, DMs don’t give female PCs a tough time for being female, although in-universe you could say that NPCs are as sexist as anyone in the middle ages, but  not in front of an obviously-powerful female wizard/cleric/rogue/fighter/etc.

But in the egalitarian world of D&D, a female sailor wouldn’t be remarkable. There wouldn’t be any controversy—certainly not for the story’s real-world audience—if the story definitively identified the sailor as a woman.

So I still read the sailor as a man, which makes me wonder if this is as close as we’ll see to representation of gender and sexual minorities in official D&D content. And while I applaud James Wyatt, Matt Sernett, and Wizards for being inclusive at all, I’m disappointed that they feel like gay characters are only possible if they sneak them in by way of gender ambiguous zombie sailors. Still, baby steps I guess.

I did a little looking around online after I read the article. I’m not really hip to the D&D tie-in fiction world and I’ve only seen a small fraction of the published adventures out there, so there’s a ton of official content that I’m not aware of. From what I found, though, it doesn’t look like there are many gay characters, even implied gay characters like our friend the ambiguous sailor.

But, it turns out Pathfinder is ahead of the game in this regard. I ran across this forum post from James Jacobs: “GLBT characters exist in Golarion, so make sure they're included.

As long as Paizo continues to have GLBT employees, we'll continue to put GLBT characters into our products. In fact, even if the employee thing changes, we'll still put GLBT characters into our products. As long as I have anything to say about it at least. There's a gay couple in the next adventure, in fact, so the inclusiveness isn't stopping with Anevia and Irabeth in this AP.

Furthermore, I'm gonna keep doing this in our APs until it's no longer an issue and folks just talk about the adventure without really pausing to discuss whether any one NPC is a sorcerer or wizard. And at that point I'll keep doing it.”

I don’t play Pathfinder. LGBT inclusiveness isn’t enough to get me to pick up a game system I don’t like. But I applaud Jacobs’ sentiment, and I wish Wizards would follow Paizo’s lead on this.

I wish I could see people like me in official D&D content. I wish I didn’t have to make a big deal out of a gender-ambiguous sailor in an article about monsters, because I wish that wasn’t the best representation gay people could hope to get in an official D&D product.